250 Years of Anti-Americanism

Where do the following opinions come from? Chirac's France? Schröder's Germany? Villepin's Europe? Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda? Read them and see if you can guess… Read them and ask yourself whether the correct approach to the ranting and raving around the world is simply to "ignore them and they will go away"…

• "Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld"
• Americanization can be defined as the "uninterrupted, exclusive and relentless striving after gain, riches and influence"
• "the distinctive vice of the new world … is already beginning ferociously to infect old Europe and is spreading a spiritual emptiness over the continent"
• America's future will bring the "greatest mediocrity in all fields: mediocrity of physical strength, mediocrity of beauty, mediocrity of intellectual capacities — we could almost say nothingness"
• "The American knows nothing; he seeks nothing but money; he has no ideas"
• America "is the most fragile thing in the world: one could not bring together more symptoms of weakness and decay"

The "opinions" are respectively from the 1930s, the early twentieth and the late nineteenth centuries, the mid-nineteenth century, the early nineteenth century, and the eighteenth century.

Find out more by reading A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism by James W. Ceaser.

(thanks to Pamela)